Holocaust Mothers and Daughters: Family, History, and Trauma

2 | Lupus in Fabula

[ 80 All great storytellers have in common the freedom with which they move up and down the rungs of their experience as on a ladder. A ladder extending downward to the interior of the earth and disappearing into the clouds is the image for a collective experience to which even the deepest shock of every individual experience, death, constitutes no impediment or barrier. [ WALTER bENJAMiN, Illuminations in the summer of 1943, the Dutch intellectual Etty hillesum wrote a letter to han Wegerif and other friends from her temporary imprisonment in Westerbork , noting: “One should be able to write fairy tales here.” Referring to the misery and human squalor in that place, she added: “One would have to be a very great poet indeed to describe them; perhaps in about ten years i might get somewhat near it.”1 hillesum could not have known what we who have lived to look back at those barbaric times are well aware of: For one thing, she would be murdered in Auschwitz four months later, at the age of twenty-nine, and would not live the extra ten years she assumed it would take her to find the right words to describe the circumstances of that grotesque place. For another, she didn’t know that poets and other artists would attempt to represent the irrepresentability of such horrors and the twilight of morality by using a mode of narration not dissimilar from that of fairy tales. As hillesum realized, although it sounded strange, “if you wanted to convey something of Westerbork life [and by extension of life in the camps] you could do it best in that form.”2 Fairy tales possess a special language so psychically powerful that since time immemorial societies have used them to channel with particular efficacy messages from the dark abysses of our human subconscious, as well as to make sense of the past or express their ethos. Through repetition, the value of these stories is reinforced in time, and the messages they contain gain in cultural power. Residing as they do at the intersection of personal psychology and culture, fairy tales partake of the formation of both.3 They influence the psychology of the child and the adult ChAPTER 2 LUPUS iN FAbULA The End of the Fairy Tale in Ruth Klüger’s Mother-Daughter Shoah Plot Ruth Klüger’s Mother-Daughter Shoah Plot 81 alike as much as they reflect and represent it; they are a cultural product inalienably connected to the context from which they arose; and they end up shaping, as all art does, the identikit of a culture. individual fantasy and collective imagination lock eyes in search of reciprocal legitimization on the magical and untrustworthy terrain of folk and fairy mythology. in his seminal When Dreams Come True, Jack Zipes explains that “both the oral and the literary forms of the fairy tale are grounded in history: they emanate from specific struggles to humanize bestial and barbaric forces, which have terrorized our minds and communities in concrete ways, threatening to destroy free will and human compassion. The fairy tale sets out to conquer this concrete terror through metaphors.”4 Shoah memoirs, which are also grounded in history, set out to conquer this terror in much the same way: via a metaphorical (mimetic) retelling of each survivor’s story. Even the Shoah teller is at bottom a storyteller. And history retold has the potential to become myth, while myth has the power to keep history—or, better, its lessons—alive. Walter benjamin once wrote: “The storyteller takes what he tells from experience —his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale.”5 Just as myths and folk stories are organized around recognizable structures that give form to their dark content, preexisting structures and time-tested narrative devices can, through language and imagery, help the Shoah teller write about that which resists expression. For example, in Night, Elie Wiesel is able to reconstruct the scenes of his youth just before the apocalyptic climax (the deportations to the camps) by tapping into an old Yiddish storytelling repertoire of legendary topoi. he gives us characters such as Moishe the beadle, a figure who is at once the fool and the savant of the village of Sighet, Wiesel’s home shtetl, and a Chagallesque luftmensch who has witnessed what others do not even begin to suspect—the Nazis committing mass murder in the...